General Douglas Haig

Field Marshall Douglas Haig is most associated with the
Battle of the Somme in World
War One. Douglas Haig was Britain’s commander-in-chief during the Somme battle
and took much criticism for the sheer loss of life in this battle.

Haig was born in 1861 in Edinburgh. He was commissioned in
the cavalry in 1885 and served both in the campaigns in the Sudan and in the
Boer War in South Africa between 1899 and 1902. In the Boer War Haig served with
distinction and he was swiftly promoted to the War Office. Here Haig helped to
implement the military reforms of Richard Haldane.

In August 1914, when the war started, Haig was the general
commanding the First Army Corps. He and his men fought at the Battle of Mons and
the first Battle of Ypres. In December 1915, Haig succeeded Sir John French as
commander-in-chief of the British Army in the Western Front.

Haig had little time for new military ideas. He was very
much steeped in the ways that he knew – conventional tactics. In 1916, Haig
put his belief in one final mighty push against the Germans to be executed in
the Somme region of France. The French had been asking for some form of military
assistance from the British to help them in their battle with the Germans at Verdun. Haig’s plan was to launch an attack on the Germans that would require
them to remove some of their troops from the Verdun battlefield thus relieving
the French in Verdun.

The Somme led to the loss of 600,000 men on the Allies
side; 400,000 were British or Commonwealth troops. When the battle had ended,
they had gained ten miles of
land. Haig has been criticised by some for his belief in the simple advance of
infantry troops on enemy lines. With 20,000 Allied soldiers killed on Day One
and 40,000 injured, some historians have claimed that Haig should have learned
from these statistics and adjusted his tactics. He did not. However, the Somme
attack was not just about antiquated tactics as the battle witnessed the use of
the rolling artillery barrage that should have helped the Allied troops as they
advanced. That it did not was more a comment on the fact that the Germans had
dug in more deeply than British intelligence had bargained for and was less
susceptible to artillery fire. Once the artillery firing had stopped, the
British had all but signaled that the infantry was on its way.

The tank
was first used en masse at the Somme but it did
not receive the enthusiastic backing of Haig – though many senior cavalry
officers were against the tank and Haig was not alone in his suspicion of it as
a weapon.

Haig served until the end of the war. He was created an
earl for his leadership in 1919. He died in 1928, but spent the last few years of
his life working for ex-servicemen, though primarily those who had been disabled
in the war. Haig was a leading light in the “Poppy Day Appeal” and the
British Legion movement.